Purchased list

What it means

Providers say it directly. Google's sender guidelines say not to purchase email addresses from other companies. Yahoo's recommendations say not to purchase mailing lists. Apple requires bulk senders to mail only recipients who explicitly subscribed, not list purchases, list rentals or email appends.

M3AAWG's position on selling email address lists calls buying, selling or sending to purchased lists, B2B or B2C, a direct violation of its core values: permission given to one company is not transferable to another, and the recipient cannot revoke it from parties they never dealt with. M3AAWG also notes that pristine spam trap hits may strongly indicate purchased lists. Spamhaus says a permission pass cannot legitimise one.

Under GDPR the buyer also needs a lawful basis of its own, and the people on the list must be told where their data came from.